Chapter 23 #3
Ivan and Sybil had already given her their answer. She remembered every word of it. But those explanations belonged to another world, shaped by human understanding and human logic. She wanted to know what the Sídhe believed it meant.
Caelion’s expression shifted—something solemn settling over him. “When two souls are called to one another…it is not something either chooses. Not at first.” His gaze held hers, steady and almost mournful. “It is instinct. A biological recognition. Draoth recognizing Draoth. A pull.”
The back of her neck prickled, hair lifting though the air was still.
“But it’s more than that,” he went on. “Something woven by fate. Or whatever force stands older than fate. Even we do not fully understand it. How it forms. Why it forms. Only that once it begins, it roots. Grows until the pair become…connected. Intrinsically. Most pairs feel each other’s shifts in energy, in emotion. ”
Elara swallowed hard. The ground felt strangely distant beneath her.
“It does not always become love,” Caelion said. “But more often than not, it does. Though the term itself means soul-friend, the bond is…” His throat bobbed. “Profound. Vulnerable.”
He hesitated, then added more quietly, “There are…older instincts that come with it. Remnants of what we once were. Some pairs mark one another,” he said.
“A mingling of scent. It is…possessive. Primitive. The bond seeking to guard itself. When marked, the scent becomes muddled to others—less enticing, less…noticeable. It dulls the pull of outside interest.” His mouth tightened faintly. “It was a once common practice.”
“And now?”
“Now it is rarely done,” Caelion said. “Only in extremes. Moments where instinct outweighs restraint. Or when the bond feels threatened.”
Her mind spun. “Do you have a Cara?”
The way Caelion’s cheeks flushed made her instantly wish she could drag the question back into her mouth and swallow it whole.
“I…do,” he said. “Though it never became a true pairing.”
Elara’s heart clenched. “Caelion, I—I shouldn’t have asked.”
He gave a small smile. “It happens more often than you’d think.
Joining one’s Draoth to another’s asks for much.
Too much, for some. The bond can be…overwhelming.
Not everyone is ready for what it demands.
” He looked out toward the tangled hedges.
“But it has advantages. Great ones. Paired Draoth is stronger—far stronger. Bonded pairs can lean on each other’s strength. Call power. Some even share dreams.”
Elara’s heart didn’t just stop—it dropped. A clean, brutal plunge straight through her ribs, leaving a hollow where breath should’ve been. Her lungs seized; her vision tightened.
The caster’s anomaly, Sybil had called it.
Though it wasn’t ether linking people—she knew that now.
It wasn’t some mystical thread accidentally tangling lives together.
It was souls. Mated pairs—drawn toward one another across impossible distances.
Across borders and years and war. Across worlds.
Even when their souls had been harvested, broken apart, and used like tools, somehow—impossibly—they had still found one another.
And for that, they had been punished.
Murdered.
Because a caster decided they disliked the person the Draoth had bound them to.
Because the bond was inconvenient.
Half of her wanted to deny the truth—to shove it away before the horror could fully settle.
But the realization kept unfurling, unstoppable.
Ice crawled along her skin, a deep, marrow-level cold that felt like sinking through water with no surface in sight.
Her breath choked out of her without sound, just the violent heave of fear and disbelief tangling deep inside her.
She was going to be sick.
Caelion’s hand landed gently on her shoulder.
“Breathe, Eilíara,” he murmured. “You don’t have to decide anything right now.
And you certainly don’t have to let Reynnar scent-mark you.
” He huffed a soft, wry exhale. “Odhrán is…from another era. In his time, there was no choice in these things. But that’s changed. Our generation changed it.”
Elara shook her head, though the movement felt like it belonged to someone else—someone farther away from the nausea storming her body.
She couldn’t speak. Her throat wouldn’t open; her voice wouldn’t form.
Not while bile still burned the back of her tongue and her mind reeled from the enormity of what Osin had done—what he was likely still doing.
The cruelty of it devastated her. More suffering.
More sins. More secret, systematic horror.
Her mouth trembled. She pressed her lips together.
Caelion waited, as though he had all the time in the world for her to gather herself.
“I don’t think I can talk to Reynnar about this yet.” The words caught as they left her mouth. “Can we just—leave it? For now?”
“Done,” Caelion said at once, and something tight in her chest loosened—only a fraction, but enough that her lungs could finally draw a full breath.
“You’d do that?” she asked. “Keep something like this from your friend?”
A low laugh slipped from him. “Reynnar is a stubborn bastard on his best days. And on the worst…” He gave a small shrug, fondness slipping easily into the gesture.
“Well. ‘Possessive brute’ is not an unfair description. Most Ellylldan are,” he added.
“Being paired with one can be…a lot. I don’t blame you for wanting a little distance. ”
Elara’s mouth twitched despite everything.
Caelion was right in many ways—and wrong in others.
Yes, Reynnar was stubborn. Possessive in the way fire is possessive—heat that spreads where it will, difficult to contain and impossible to command.
He could be overwhelming, infuriating, larger than the space he occupied.
But that was only the part of him people saw first. Beneath all of that, there was something else.
Something she had begun to recognize long before she had words for it.
It lived in the patience he carried with him—in the constancy with which he moved around her, careful without making a display of it—steadying her without touching, or touching her without taking.
None of it was loud.
None of it asked for recognition.
Yet it remained there all the same, persistent.
In a world that had taught her nothing lasted but cold, he was warmth.
When everything else in her life tilted and splintered beneath her feet, he stood unmoved.
The surety of him unsettled her almost as much as it soothed.
It was not peace exactly, but a fragile reprieve—something that felt perilously like refuge, and therefore like danger.
A grievous thing, that sense of belonging.
It pressed against her heart, luminous and painful all at once, a truth hovering at the precipice of a breath that refused to take form. Naming it felt like stepping too close to an open flame—beautiful, irresistible, and capable of burning everything it touched.
He was—
The back door swung open.
“There you are.”
Aoife leaned against the doorframe, an easy grin playing at her mouth. “Odhrán hasn’t fed me, and he’s making me work. A crime. And now that Reynnar’s crawling out of bed—and Eamon’s risen heroically from the floor—the rest of us have no excuse. Come on, then. Labor awaits.”
Before Elara could form a response, Aoife linked their arms and steered her toward the house. She turned, half laughing, meaning to call something back to Caelion.
But his attention wasn’t on her. His gaze had followed Aoife.
And suddenly—after everything he had said—Elara understood.
For weeks, she had mistaken the softness in his expression for courtesy, for passing interest, for the easy fondness of friendship. But the way his eyes lingered on Aoife—the almost-shame in how he drank her in, as though he meant to look away but couldn’t—told another story.
And with that smallest of pauses, something inside Elara went strangely quiet. Sympathy. For him. For herself. For the tangle of feelings they were both pretending not to carry.
Aoife tugged her inside. Warm air rose to meet them, carrying the scent of hearth-smoke and bread.
From deeper in the house came the clatter of dishes, the muted hum of voices, the small, reliable sounds of life continuing.
But Caelion’s face stayed with her—the trace of hope caught against sorrow, too tightly wound to tell one from the other.